Unmaking the past making the future

This project examines how visions of Europe change across generations through the lens of ancestry-based citizenship in Germany, Bulgaria, and Italy. While European citizenship is often framed as a step toward a postnational identity, its meaning remains closely tied to national histories and legal frameworks.  

Ancestral citizenship, introduced for reasons such as historical redress, shifting borders, or past emigration, offers a unique perspective on how individuals relate to both their national and European identities. Older generations often emphasize reconnecting with ancestral homelands and coping with intergenerational trauma, while younger generations are more focused on the European dimension of citizenship.  

Using a mixed-method, comparative approach, the project analyzes national debates, individual experiences, and the role of intermediaries who facilitate these pathways. Ultimately, it explores how ancestry-based citizenship shapes intergenerational understandings of Europe and contributes to a fair, future-oriented European identity. 

The project fills a key research gap by highlighting the largely overlooked role of ancestry-based citizenship as a legal pathway to Europe and in the formation of European identity—an area where scholarship has focused far more on residency-based or birthright models. It also addresses the absence of intergenerational perspectives, showing how different generations of ancestral citizens attach distinct meanings, motivations, and visions of Europe to the same legal pathway. By bringing these two dimensions together, the project reveals how inherited citizenship paths shape Europe not only across borders but also across time. 

1. Analyze generational perspectives on Europe – to understand how ancestral, bloodline-based citizenship shapes different generations’ visions, motivations, and attachments to Europe. 
2. Examine national and EU-level dynamics – to study how debates, policies, and intermediaries in Germany, Bulgaria, and Italy influence the meaning and practice of ancestry-based citizenship. 
3. Assess the role of ancestral citizenship in shaping a future-oriented Europe – to explore how inherited citizenship contributes to building a fair, inclusive, and transnational European identity. 

The project employs a mixed-method approach to analyze ancestral citizenship from both political and individual perspectives. It uses NLP and topic modelling as well as discourse analysis to examine parliamentary debates in Bulgaria, Germany, Italy, and at the EU level to understand the justifications for granting or restricting access to ancestry-based citizenship. Simultaneously, it draws on semi-structured and biographical interviews with ancestral citizenship holders and their families to trace personal journeys and shifting perceptions across generations. The study also engages with stakeholders, such as brokers and mediators, who facilitate or shape these pathways. 

1. Adopting a mixed-method, multilevel approach, our research traces changing narratives, expectations, and contestations around (Spät)Aussiedler citizenship. At the political level, semantic topic modelling of parliamentary debates (1949–2023) reveals shifting justificatory logics—from historical responsibility and demographic needs to concerns about integration, security, and national belonging. At the individual level, semi-structured interviews with twenty interlocutors from Kazakhstan, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine illuminate how applicants and their families interpret restitutionary citizenship across two generations, highlighting evolving notions of ancestry, entitlement, mobility, and ambivalent attachments to Germany. Juxtaposing these political and personal perspectives, the paper shows how citizenship restitution operates simultaneously as symbolic redress and as a state-managed migration channel. It identifies points of convergence and friction between official narratives and lived experience, offering broader insights into changing conceptions of migration, citizenship, and historical justice in contemporary Europe.                        
2. Drawing on 32 semi-structured in-depth interviews, conducted between September 2024 and May 2025, with (late) resettlers in Germany originating from present-day Kazakhstan, Romania and Russia, we develop a historically-informed intergenerational perspective on politicisation that sheds light on the significance of collective memories of war and conflicts impacting present-day political attitudes, behaviours and preferences. W find a persistent victimisation memory being transmitted and often remained unchallenged across generations. On the other hand, intergenerational differences are to be found in the general (re-)socialisation processes. While older generations’ political stances remain more “set in stone”, younger generations are more open to (re)learning, taking a distance from the older generations. Divergent interpretations of the Russo-Ukrainian war reveal particularly stark generational difference and cause an intergenerational (avoidance of) conflict: The parents’ generation often avoid conversations about politics with their adult children, while adult children sometimes rebel and challenge their parents’ views. Analysing such intra-family dynamics illuminate how family memory transmission, socialisation and re-socialisation interact to inform patterns of politicisation among (Spät)Aussiedler in contemporary Germany.

• Three country-specific policy briefs 
• An open-access Special Issue submitted to Citizenship Studies Journal, 
• A final conference in Brussels to disseminate final findings at the European 
  level to be co-organized with the Migration Policy Group 
• Compilation of the open-access collectively authored monograph to be submitted 
  to a related Series to spell out the scholarly contribution of the three-country comparative analysis

(Spät)Aussiedler – commonly referred to as “late resettlers” (Spätaussiedler), and before 1993 Aussiedler–have the right to “return” and claim citizenship in Germany. Migration of (Spät)Aussiedler in Germany legally relies on a constitutional right– article 116(1)–that was promulgated after the Second World War and was grounded on blood and ethnicity line. Read together with the 1953 Federal Expellees Act, paragraph 4, however, this right to belong to the German nation, and thereby to access German citizenship is also conditional upon having suffered from the “consequences of the war”. 

Generation - we understand it as a group of people who have been shaped by the same or similar major social experiences. We rely on a twofold understanding:  (1) generation defined through one’s life course and social age, which, instead of biological age, is socially constructed and defined through care commitments in one’s family and/or community ; (2) generation defined through first or second-hand experience of migration, that is concerned with how those migrated and their descendants relate to the ancestral state and society  

• Blanchard, M. (2025). Is citizenship restitution through time‑extended ius sanguinis a pathway to post‑national citizenship? In D. Owen & R. Bauböck (Eds.), Citizenship as reparations: Should the victims of historical injustice be offered membership? (RSC Working Paper 2025/55). European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies.
• Blanchard, M. (2025). Bloodline gateways: Italian ancestral citizenship as a resource to bypass European migration policies. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 51(11), 2734–2750.